SwiftKey Beta 3 Now Available – New Emoji UI, And Other Bug Fixes Included

Just last night, SwiftKey pushed out a new update to their beta version of their keyboard. The current beta includes plenty of emoji’s, actually over 500 of them. As well as being able to type in the word and it will match it with the correct emoji, which is pretty cool too. The emojis are only available for devices running Android 4.1 and higher. The updated beta does resolve some performance and memory issues that were seen with the second beta. This includes keyboard freezes, incorrect vibration feedback, slowdown while switching tabs and more. The Emokji UI has also been redone, which you can see in the image above. It’s been redesigned with new backspace bars, swipe gestures, layout changes, and bigger smilies.

Additionally, SwiftKey has explained why the emoji could appear differently between different Android devices and messaging apps. SwiftKey uses Android’s internal emoji font, which is different in Jelly Bean and KitKat. While popular messaging apps like WhatsApp use app-specific font and Google Hangouts uses the KitKat font, obviously. Although the emoji meanings remain the same, their images will not always match from app to app and device to device. Hopefully this doesn’t ruin your flirty texts or dare I say sexts.

As always, the latest SwiftKey beta is available to be downloaded and side-loaded manually via the apk file. I really hope they move this process over to a Google Group or Google+ Community and use the new Beta features Google announced for the Play Store back at Google I/O last year. It would make things much easier. Remember that the beta is still a work-in-progress, so there may be bugs. If you don’t want to use the beta, the stable version is available in Google Play right now, in both paid and free trial versions. I’d urge you to check out Swiftkey if you’ve never used it before, as it’s an amazing keyboard. I’ve been using it since it first came out a few years ago.